violation. Not when so many women are violated much worse. This messes with you on so many levels. How can you be a victim of rape when the rape itself was quiet and by someone you know and maybe you’ve just been overreacting? How can you be a victim of rape when you weren’t dragged into an alleyway? How can you be a victim of rape if you still want sex? Surely that diminishes it? Surely you’re taking a label away from someone, someone more deserving of it?
But you were raped. You know you were. Your body and soul knows you were.
On your bad days you curl up into a ball and sob uncontrollably about the fact you were. Or you know you were but you can’t handle it and don’t want to open up that box thank you very much because you’re terrified it will destroy you when you finally do, so you push it down and numb it out and continue getting on with this torturous business of living a life hoping eventually that the big ball of shame and confusion and pain will erode away, rather than blobbing after you quietly, tapping you on the shoulder every so often, saying, ‘I’m here because you were raped, and I’m sorry but I don’t think I can go away.’ And you bat it off and numb it out and drink too much and fuck fuck fuck men to prove how well you can do it, even though the blob of emotions is hanging like a limp balloon in the corner.
Or you have learnt to wear the label, to talk about the label, to get up and say ‘I am a victim and this happened to me’ and other people say you are brave and other people are wondering if maybe you are making it up. And you tell people you want to have sex with and hope beyond hope it doesn’t change how they see you, how they screw you, but, also, at the same time, you secretly want them to be more gentle, more caring, more understanding, but also really fancy you and not see that label ever, and not let it change how they have sex with you. And you know it’s an impossible task and you wonder whether it’s better not to tell anyone, because you are so much more than a victim of rape, but then, also you are still a victim of rape. You are both, and that is inescapable.
You wish every day that you’d just never been raped.
You feel sick with jealousy at women who have never been raped. You fantasise about how amazing their sex lives must be without all the ‘rape clutter’ that you’re constantly rummaging through and trying to make love through, and you hate them for having it so easy. Then you start talking to other women and realise there are hardly any women you’ve met who haven’t been raped. They say one in five and I call bullshit, probably more like four out of five.
But people get uncomfortable when you say things like that.
The thing about being a victim of rape is you are constantly a source of discomfort. To yourself, as well as others. So many men have sex with women who have been raped, and yet they do not know it. Because the women don’t tell them, because, here’s the thing: it’s so hard to admit … Being raped is the least sexy thing ever.
It has nothing to do with sex and yet everything to do with sex.
It’s too complicated and painful and there’s nowhere for the shame to go, so you bury it and bury it and try to be like the other women. The other women who do not carry this ball of anger and shame and can fling their legs open and pant and scream. You pretend to be them. Sometimes you can con yourself, and him. Other times you can only con him. You tuck your sexual trauma away to make yourself sexier to the species who took your sexuality away from you.
There are so many of us, and yet maybe there aren’t. And you don’t want to be the broken one. Especially as it wasn’t your fault this happened to you, although, of course, sometimes you worry it was your fault.
So you pretend, a lot, that you’re fine. That you’re like the other girls. But … maybe you are pretending to be a woman everyone else is pretending to be too?